The Beat’em Up Genre Tribute: Castle Crashers (2008)

Castle Crashers is one of the last really successful beat’em up games which are based on the traditional brawling game style with sidescrolling stages and multiplayer support.

It was first released on the XBOX360 in 2008 and was sold over 2,6 million times there, it took the Behemoth almost two years to port it to the Playstation 3 and again two years until it was finally ported to the PC via Steam.

In the game up to four players have to brawl against a whole army of orcs and all kinds of other creatures to rescue the four princesses, the game plays like the good old Final Fight and Streets of Rage games to a big part but there are a lot of fun and also gory elements featured + the knights can grab a ton of items there.

While the game starts with only the knights, the number of playable characters can raise to 31! through a lot unlockable characters and a few which can be bought via DLC.

This game is like the swansong for the traditional beat’em up genre and a giant success worldwide on every platform. Fans are waiting for a new part which will happen hopefully sooner or later.

Beside Streets of Rage, Castle Crashers is the only beat’em up we got two submissions for in the first round of our tribute to the genre. With the one above by Emortal982 showing the general action in the game with four players at the same time, and the one to the right the level three boss fight against the giant catfish.

– You can enlarge most of the images here by clicking on them –

About our illustrations of Castle Crashers and the artists behind it

Mortalshinobi is a supporter of Game-Art-HQ since 2011 already and participated in many art contests and art tributes like the Mortal Kombat tribute and recently the Virtual Worlds projects about stages and environments in video games. You can visit his complete gallery here.

Emortal982 is an artist who participated back in 2011 in a Mortal Kombat II art contest by us and just recently he started participating in Game-Art-HQ art projects like this one or the upcoming Doom 20th Anniversary Tribute!